The development and evaluation of self-esteem measuring instruments

It is argued that a major failing with most existing measures of self-esteem is that they do not even attempt to take into account the value system of the individual subject. A relatively straightforward method of measuring self-esteem was proposed based on an aggregate of a subject's self-ratings in different areas of his life weighted by the relative importance of those life areas to the subject. This approach is used to develop a measure of self-esteem for Australian tertiary students. A self-esteem questionnaire was also developed, based on life areas important to other Australian college students. An evaluation of these two instruments is then reported based on 235 Psychology students at Melbourne University. Some implications of this approach to the structure of self-esteem itself are considered.     

Personal-social education: Beyond the national curriculum

The impact of the first ten years of the National Curriculum in England and Wales upon personal-social education (PSE) is analysed. It is proposed that many indirect processes have led to PSE having a lesser place in schools. The analysis offers some broad pointers for improvement. A conception of improved PSE for 21st-century schools is identified.     

Conflicting codes: Professional, ethical, and legal obligations in archaeology

Archaeologists employed in governmental positions often deal with issues that produce conflicts between their professional duties to their employer, their ethical responsibilities to the resource, and their obligations as established by legislation. The paper examines some of the conflicts imposed on governmental archaeologists by each of these systems but focuses on the conflicts imposed by federal legislation and regulations on governmental archaeologists, using “Kennewick Man” as an example. This is a revised edition of a paper written for the symposium: “Ethics in Science: Special Problems in Anthropology and Archaeology,” organized by Merrilee Salmon; 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Philadelphia, February 15, 1998). The original paper was in a more conversational style as befitting a discussion atmosphere. Revisions, comments, and opinions are entirely the author’s. Joe Watkins is the Anadarko Agency Archaeologist at the Bureau of Indian Affairs and is a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, Indiana University.     

MacPotthoff: automated calculation of the Potthoff regression bias procedure

Test bias, in contrast to test fairness, is best conceptualized in validity terms amenable to statistical analysis. Evidence of predictive validity may be most salient in many situations. Evaluation of predictive bias is generally operationalized via linear regression. Potthoff (1978) provided an efficient and parsimonious regression bias procedure that allows both simultaneous and separate tests of regression slopes and intercepts across groups. A Macintosh computer program, MacPotthoff, is presented for automated calculation of Potthoff regression bias statistics.     

Approaches to Learning of Nigerian Secondary School Children: Emic and Etic Perspectives

Two studies are reported which explore the approach to learning of Nigerian secondary school pupils from both emic and etic perspectives. In the first study, 150 14–16-year-olds were asked to provide open-ended answers to the question “What do you mean by learning?” Content analysis identified learning conceptions similar to those found in Western studies which are thought to underlie deep and surface approaches to learning. The second study investigates the reliability and validity of a Western-developed instrument, the Learning Process Questionnaire, for 265 14–16-year-old Nigerian children. The findings based on internal consistency reliability estimates, scale factor analysis, and hypothesized correlations with other variables were generally encouraging. Tentative comparisons of the approach to learning of these Nigerians with same-aged Australian, Nepalese, Hong Kong, and Filipino children questioned the stereotype of Third-World learners as rote learners.     

A postmodern critical theory of research use

The knowledge use field is in a state of conceptual disarray that has contributed to problems in the dissemination and use of knowledge. Examining the nature of knowledge in a critical realist epistemology results in a reconceptualization of knowledge use from a postmodern critical theorist perspective. This theory takes as its focus the study of research, dissemination, and use as cultural structure, ritual, and ideology; and addresses concerns about knowledge use by articulating a conceptual frame-work that triangulates among issues related to knowledge construction, power and action, and ethics and ideology, as integral to any concept of knowledge and its use. John M. Watkins is a private consultant atInquiry and Learning for Change. His primary work is in the area of action research and critical inquiry with schools and communities.     

Telephone counsellors' conceptualising abilities and counselling skills

Telephone counsellors must make accurate assessments of callers' needs so as to provide appropriate counselling help or referral. But few researchers have examined counsellors' conceptualising abilities in relation to their counselling skill. Two studies involving telephone counsellors were carried out. The first relied on counsellors' post-interview conceptualisations of callers' problems and needs and found no link between the accuracy of these conceptualisations and counselling skill. The second used Kagan's Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) to retrieve counsellors' conceptualisations made during the course of their interviews. The accuracy of these conceptualisations-in-action was related to level of counselling skill. Implications for training and research are discussed     

The revelation effect: when disguising test items induces recognition

Documented here is a bias whereby items are more likely to be judged as having been presented beforehand if they are disguised in some way and so have to be discovered or "revealed." The bias was found for test words that were unfolded letter by letter (Experiments 1 and 3), presented with their letters either transposed (Experiments 2 and 3), or individually rotated (Experiments 4 and 5), or rotated as a whole (Experiment 5), and for test numbers that were presented in the form of roman numerals (Experiment 6) or equations (Experiment 7). The bias occurred both for items that were presented beforehand and for those that were not. No bias was found when words were judged, not for prior occurrence, but for typicality as category instances (Experiment 8), lexicality (Experiment 9), frequency of general usage (Experiment 10), or number of times encountered during the preceding week (Experiment 11).     

Further evidence of the intricacy of memory span

Memory span was measured for lists of verbal items constructed such that the items in the first half of the list were of one category and those of the second half were of another. In Experiment 1, the lists consisted of digits and words (e.g., 2, 8, 7, horse, cow, sheep or horse, cow, sheep, 2, 8, 7); in Experiment 2, they consisted of words from the same semantic domain and words from different semantic domains; in Experiments 3 and 4, they consisted of words that rhymed and words that did not rhyme. A category-order effect occurred in each experiment: Span was larger when the digits, same-domain words, or rhyming words occurred in the first half of the list than when they occurred in the second half. These findings suggest that memory span is more complex than is generally assumed.     

Is vocational assessment training in counseling psychology programs too restricted?

To gather information about vocational assessment training in counseling psychology programs, we surveyed the 64 programs that comprised the Council of Counseling Psychology Training Programs. A total of 56 (88%) directors returned their questionnaires. The survey data suggest that the Strong Interest Inventory (SII), in comparison to other vocational assessment methods, is taught in far more graduate programs and seemingly is accorded a relatively exclusive place in vocational assessment training. In discussing the results, we acknowledge the psychometric soundness and usability of the SII, lament the fact that students appear to receive limited exposure to other valuable vocational assessment tools during their training, and recommend that greater diversity be incorporated into the vocational assessment training of counseling psychology students.